view mercurial/help/dates.txt @ 39814:d059cb669632

wireprotov2: allow multiple fields to follow revision maps

The *data wire protocol commands emit a series of CBOR values.
Because revision/delta data may be large, their data is emitted
outside the map as a top-level bytestring value.

Before this commit, we'd emit a single optional bytestring
value after the revision descriptor map. This got the job done.
But it was limiting in that we could only send a single field.
And, it required the consumer to know that the presence of a
key in the map implied the existence of a following bytestring
value.

This commit changes the encoding strategy so top-level bytestring
values in the stream are explicitly denoted in a "fieldsfollowing"
key. This key contains an array defining what fields that follow
and the expected size of each field.

By defining things this way, we can easily send N bytestring
values without any ambiguity about their order. In addition,
clients only need to know how to parse ``fieldsfollowing`` to
know if extra values are present.

Because this breaks backwards compatibility, we've bumped the version
number of the wire protocol version 2 API endpoint.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D4620

Some commands allow the user to specify a date, e.g.:

- backout, commit, import, tag: Specify the commit date.
- log, revert, update: Select revision(s) by date.

Many date formats are valid. Here are some examples:

- ``Wed Dec 6 13:18:29 2006`` (local timezone assumed)
- ``Dec 6 13:18 -0600`` (year assumed, time offset provided)
- ``Dec 6 13:18 UTC`` (UTC and GMT are aliases for +0000)
- ``Dec 6`` (midnight)
- ``13:18`` (today assumed)
- ``3:39`` (3:39AM assumed)
- ``3:39pm`` (15:39)
- ``2006-12-06 13:18:29`` (ISO 8601 format)
- ``2006-12-6 13:18``
- ``2006-12-6``
- ``12-6``
- ``12/6``
- ``12/6/6`` (Dec 6 2006)
- ``today`` (midnight)
- ``yesterday`` (midnight)
- ``now`` - right now

Lastly, there is Mercurial's internal format:

- ``1165411109 0`` (Wed Dec 6 13:18:29 2006 UTC)

This is the internal representation format for dates. The first number
is the number of seconds since the epoch (1970-01-01 00:00 UTC). The
second is the offset of the local timezone, in seconds west of UTC
(negative if the timezone is east of UTC).

The log command also accepts date ranges:

- ``<DATE`` - at or before a given date/time
- ``>DATE`` - on or after a given date/time
- ``DATE to DATE`` - a date range, inclusive
- ``-DAYS`` - within a given number of days of today